Please join us for lunch this Friday at 1pm in the Lang Building room 263 to hear Arman Fadaei, Iranian urban planner, PhD candidate from Politecnico di Milano and visiting researcher at Penn.

“Legal frameworks as the backbone of urban management and planning systems play a fundamental role in shaping urbanity. In this regard, the emergence of informal settlements of the global south is traceable in exclusionary legal frameworks of “land use planning and regulation”. The current models of urban planning implemented in the southern cities are mainly based on blueprint type master planning and a reference framework charting the overall configuration and direction of future urban growth. However these models have no been able to accommodate the rapid rate of urban growth in the cities of global south and have led to emergence of informal settlements which manifest inadequate conditions of living. My research is an attempt to detect the role of urban planning and its regulatory framework in production of informality.”